Computational Neurolinguist and AI Speech Researcher @ Stanford

Nathan Roll

Hi, I'm Nathan. Nice to meet you!

I'm a Ph.D. student and EDGE fellow at Stanford University researching the intersection of computation, cognition, and speech. My work spans mechanistic interpretability, neural architecture design, and reinforcement learning for speech systems — grounded in how humans process and produce language. I am affiliated with The Department of Linguistics and The Stanford NLP Group, with collaborations across The Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, The Department of Computer Science, The Department of Psychology, and The Department of Surgery.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in collaborating.

Speech

Advancing how machines understand spoken language — building robust, fair, and efficient speech recognition systems across languages and accents.

Published 2025

In-Context Learning Boosts Speech Recognition

Human-like adaptation to speakers and language varieties via interleaved text-audio prompts. State-of-the-art ASR.

Paper
Published 2025

Scaling Confirmation Bias in ASR

How automatic speech recognition systems exhibit confirmation bias at scale. SLaTE 2025.

Published 2024

Evaluating OpenAI's Whisper ASR

Performance analysis across diverse accents and speaker traits. JASA Express Letters, 94 citations.

Published 2023

PSST! Prosodic Speech Segmentation with Transformers

Integrated approach to prosodic boundary detection via lexico-syntactic knowledge transfer. CoNLL 2023.

Ongoing 2025

Gabormer: Neural Gabor Filters in Speech Models

91% of conv kernels converge to temporal Gabor filters. Gabormer achieves better WER while converging 32% faster.

Ongoing 2025

Architectural Fingerprinting in ASR

Conformers “Categorize Early” while Transformers “Integrate Late.” Architecture predicts representational profiles (AUC=0.88).

Ongoing 2025

Cross-Linguistic Speech Emotion Recognition

Multilingual Whisper shows strong universality and weak in-group advantage. Emotion encoded across all layers.

Ongoing 2025

Representational Geometry Across ASR Encoder Families

Conformers, Transformers, and SSMs carve distinct representational manifolds. Mamba encoders distribute phonemic information uniformly; Conformers concentrate 78% in layers 4–8.

Ongoing 2026

GaborMamba: State-Space Attention with Learned Spectro-Temporal Priors

Hybrid SSM-attention encoder initialized from Gabor-parameterized state matrices. Achieves WER parity with Conformer-XXL at 41% fewer FLOPs.

Ongoing 2026

Reward-Shaped Policy Optimization for Accented and Low-Resource ASR

GRPO with perceptual reward shaping reduces hallucinations by 34% and WER by 12.7% relative on accented speech. Outperforms SFT with 5× less labeled data.

Computation

Exploring the mechanics of intelligent systems — from language model internals and quantum circuits to novel architectures and training paradigms.

Ongoing 2025

Causal Tracing in Variational Quantum Circuits

Adapting activation patching to parameterized quantum circuits via mid-circuit tomography. Gate-level causal attribution recovers 94% of task-relevant unitary structure on 8-qubit classifiers.

Ongoing 2026

Superposition in Superposition: Polysemanticity in Quantum Feature Maps

Quantum feature encodings exhibit representational polysemanticity analogous to classical networks. Sparse quantum autoencoders disentangle 3.2× overcomplete feature bases in 12-qubit latent spaces.

Ongoing 2025

Latent Curvature from Instruction Tuning

Alignment shifts κ from −0.03 (base) to +0.12 (instruct). Manifold remains locally flat for practical steering.

Ongoing 2025

Bias Transplantation: Distilling Architectural Priors Across ASR Paradigms

Transplanting Conformer's early-categorization bias into Transformers via auxiliary probing losses recovers 61% of the WER gap without architectural changes.

Preprint 2025

Polyprompt: Multilingual Knowledge Extraction

Automating knowledge extraction from multilingual language models with dynamic prompt generation.

Paper
Published 2024

Greybox: Multilingual Propaganda Detection

Progressive fine-tuning for multilingual detection of propaganda techniques. SemEval 2024.

Published 2024

Short Textual Value Column Representation

Using symbol-level language models for table representation. NeurIPS TRL Workshop 2024.

Cognition

Bridging artificial and biological intelligence — modeling language disorders, probing neural representations, and connecting machine learning to cognitive science.

Ongoing 2025

Lesioned Language Models Mimic Human Aphasias

LMs as “animal models” of the human language system. Attention ≈ perception/retrieval, FFN ≈ syntactic production.

Preprint 2025

The Text Aphasia Battery (TAB)

A clinically-grounded benchmark for aphasia-like deficits in language models with validated automated evaluation.

Paper
Ongoing 2026

Quantum Cognition Circuits: Interpretable Models of Human Probability Judgment

Mechanistic decomposition of quantum probability models for conjunction fallacy and order effects. Identified 3 circuit motifs that map onto dual-process cognitive architectures.

Ongoing 2025

Intimate Partner Violence Detection from EHR

Embeddings reduce false positives by 86% vs bag-of-words. F1 improves from 0.37 to 0.63.

Published 2023

Unsupervised POS Induction for Kolyma Yukaghir

Modeling documentation materials in an endangered Siberian language. Field Matters Workshop 2023.

Paper